1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to a system and method for role pen based messaging in a synchronous collaborative environment. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system and method for conversing with a subset of a plurality of users who are participating in a synchronous collaborative session.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the onset of advanced technology, online collaboration has become increasingly feasible. Online collaboration systems support groups of people that are engaged in a common task (or goal) by providing an interface to a shared environment. For example, users may use a distributed presentation tool on each of their client computers, such as Lotus e-Meeting or Windows NetMeeting, in order for the users to collaborate on a particular topic. As businesses become more global, and as businesses cut expenses, online collaboration has become a popular mechanism for users to participate in a meeting who are located at different geographic locations.
A challenge found with collaborative tools is their lack of ability for a user to intuitively converse with a subset of online collaboration participants. For example, a user may wish to revise a flowchart that is being presented on a display window during a distributed presentation. In this example, the user revises the flowchart using the same window as an existing presentation in order to provide intuitive feedback to other participants. Many tools exist that allows a user to broadcast a message to each participant, but these tools, however, do not allow a user to selectively send a message to a subset of participants.
For existing collaborative tools that support conversations with a selected group of users, a conversation originator has to create a separate chat window and invite other participants to join the chat window. Users involved in this conversation have to explicitly add other members to the conversation. If a participant wants to converse with different subsets of the participants of the collaborative session, he is required to open multiple chat windows. A challenge found is that a user must remember which users correspond to which chat windows and the proliferation of such chat windows makes online collaboration a tedious and ineffective task.
What is needed, therefore, is a system and method for a user to intuitively converse with different subsets of participants during a synchronous collaborative session using only one common shared display area such that common messages are visible to each participant and restricted messages are visible only to intended recipients.